??, plutonium, and other pronunciation clues

??. The first one means metal. The second one is just a clue how to pronounce it. My question is- when you have characters that are composed of multiple different elements (more than just 2), how do you tell which one is the pronunciation clue? Hope that made sense... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#Formation_of_characters "Phono-Semantic Compounds" if anyone is interested.

Hi there, there are actually no rules that can definitely tell us exactly which part indicate the meaning and which part indicate the pronunciation. Each word is different and can be arranged in a different way. The only thing that can help is probably to remember the most commonly used radicals that indicate the meaning, (In Chinese, there are a list of most commonly used radicals to indicate the meaning of the word, like for people, for metal, for water, etc ), then the other part will be the one that indicate the pronunciation. Usually, even if we spot the pronunciation clue, the pronunciation of the radical might not be exactly the same as the whole word, they might only have the same vowels, but different consonant.... Hope that helps.